


THE FIRST

by spicyshimmy



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-04
Updated: 2011-10-04
Packaged: 2017-10-24 07:45:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/260827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A what-if scenario for elleblr and syberfag on tumblr. Karl and Anders are two years apart, lifetimes away. Just a short piece about life in the Fereldan Circle, and first feelings. <i>Anders arrives at Lake Calenhad with a pillow in his arms, held tight to his chest, and not much else—just skinny wrists and a runny nose. He sees skirts and ankles, pedestals with open tomes, and smells dusty air, cold light against colder stone. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	THE FIRST

Anders arrives at Lake Calenhad with a pillow in his arms, held tight to his chest, and not much else—just skinny wrists and a runny nose. He sees skirts and ankles, pedestals with open tomes, and smells dusty air, cold light against colder stone.

He’s not tall enough to see anything more than the patterns on the rugs in the libraries, patterns on the runners through the halls, and the shadows the wall-sconces cast, the shadows that stretch behind templar boots.

Mages and templars both wear skirts, Anders thinks, probably the first person ever to think it, certainly the only person who counts. And he’s the first to hate sleeping in the dorms with other children his age, too, all the snorting and snoring in the night, a few of them thrashing through nightmares. They make it so easy, teased the next morning by templar recruits because they won’t last, not through the threat and promise of distant harrowings.

They act—generally—smelly and stupid, under-arms stinking and flames at their fingertips, pretending they know more than they actually do.

*

Karl is two years older, fifteen and not even that tall. The fuzz on his chin looks like the fuzz on a baby bird, pale and uneven, the same color as the Anderfels on all the maps, white-capped mountains tempered by snow. He reads in the library without looking up, thumb on the fuzz, rubbing it raw, and Anders copies the way he looks from all the way down the table, frowning between the lines of text instead of straight at them.

*

The first winter, Anders is taller than he is, _Karl Thekla_ , who sleeps three beds down on the bottom bunk instead of the top. He wears woolly socks and has ink-stains on his fingers, cat fur on his robes from where Mr. Wiggums sleeps draped over his thigh during private study. Anders watches the claws go in and out, in and out, searching for a mother who’s no longer there.

Afterward, Mr. Wiggums licks his paws clean, chewing the sharp nails. He looks older with his gray eyes open than he does while he’s sleeping—so much more than a kitten, with more gray around his jaws.

Some of the apprentices go out into the garden, to watch the snow fall between the elfroot and jam handfuls down each other’s collars, but Anders sits on his bed reading.

Three beds down, Karl does the same.

‘Thekla,’ Anders says, in a tone like a templar, or like two grave senior enchanters meeting by chance between lectures.

Mr. Wiggums stretches and curls, on his back with his white paws clutching at nothing, and Karl ruffles the tufted fur at his armpits, which looks softer than anything else. ‘Anders,’ he replies.

They know each other’s names, which has to be the start of something.

Mr. Wiggums’ purrs fill the room, so much better than silence, the creak of a bed-frame or the turn of the pages.

Anders likes the books that lie to him the most, the ones that don’t pretend to teach him anything, but as hard as he tries, he can’t see what Karl’s reading, cracked leather cover pressed against his knees.

‘Hungry?’ Karl asks, without warning.

‘But it’s not time to eat,’ Anders replies.

Karl’s eyes are paler than a cat’s in the darkness, with only a candle on his bed-side table, light he snuffs out without having to blow. ‘I know,’ he says, and Anders feels it, the whisper of magic as he pinches the wick with a lucky spell.

*

Karl’s good for midnight snacks, better than anyone else would be. He keeps close watch, and Anders keeps cheese and apples in his skirts, and most of the time he doesn’t drop anything.

They spread the food out on the floor, in unused corners of the library, Anders’s cheek next to the gold-lettered binding of _Spiritorum Etherialis_.

‘Dust,’ Karl says. ‘My favorite seasoning.’

Anders flicks it off his cheese while Karl polishes an apple. He pulls the fabric over his chest tight, as though it wasn’t tight already, and the red curve gleams.

*

It isn’t about height, Anders learns, but about how broad you are, how strong your shoulders, how quick your tongue. The bigger you are, the more the templars notice you—and when the templars arrive, demanding to know where the mouse in the porridge came from, or who’s been at the larder again, Karl is always petting the cat, rubbing his chin, so deeply engrossed by his reading.

‘You’re so _clever_ , aren’t you,’ Anders tells him, half in awe and half in envy.

Karl’s smiles are rare, few and far between, like the secret spots on a cat’s belly, the gleam on the curve of an apple, or the footnotes that explain a word’s other meaning.

‘I know,’ Karl says. ‘It’s such a burden, really.’

*

The first spring, they’re the same height, trudging through the mud to study deathroot. Karl’s hands are filthy by the time they’re finished, and Anders’s cheeks are streaked between his freckles, his nose running and running.

Karl offers him a handkerchief, and Anders thinks he wants to kiss him, there beneath the gray bower of old vines, clipped to keep from growing wild along the fine stone frame.

Anders licks the corner of his mouth, uncertain of the feeling, soft fronds unfurling from the dirt with the rain.

‘Hungry?’ Karl asks, a familiar invitation.

Anders bunches his skirts in his hand, Karl’s handkerchief held with them. Karl’s hair is kept short and neat at the back of his neck, not long enough to hide two of his freckles, though it’s the first time Anders has seen them.

‘But it’s not time to eat,’ Anders says with a wink, and he nearly loses a boot in the elfroot patch in his hurry to get to the kitchens.

 **END**


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